Avery Gould awoke amidst a sea of empty bottles and styrofoam take-away boxes, wearing the same pair of boxers and wife-beater he had been wearing for the past two weeks. His stench hung thick in the air, mingling with the odor of food gone bad and an overflowing litter box, but he was growing used to it all. At the rate time seemed to be dragging on, he may as well have lived his whole life like this. It was everything he knew. The reek, the itch of a bare mattress, the dull ache in his stomach.
His bladder was the only thing that forced him to rise, dragging himself out of bed and slouching towards the bathroom. He tripped over a pile of trash and swore under his breath. Unfortunately, when he came to the bathroom, he was met with the realization that after his stomach rebelled the night before, he had failed to do anything more than stumble back to his mattress, there in the middle of the living room. The acidic tang of vomit invaded his nose and he gagged involuntarily, flailing his hand in the general direction of the toilet until he found the handle and flushed. It didn't help as much as he had hoped. It didn't help matters that he couldn't be bothered to flush after urinating.
Avery splashed his face with cold water and looked at his reflection in the mirror. God, he looked awful. His hair was greasy and matted, his shirt had food stains on it, and there were bags under his eyes. As he turned away, too disgusted to bear it, he noticed what it was that had make him throw up the night before, sitting on the counter. He picked it up.
It was a picture of a woman in her late twenties. She had silky brown hair, hazel eyes, and the most perfect complexion he'd ever seen. Her smile was broad and white, and so genuine that it was impossible to imagine her as anything other than full of joy. Unfortunately for Avery, he had seen her with every ounce of joy drained out of her. Her perfect hair fallen out, too weak to even lift her limbs. Whatever else he had seen in his life, that was too much for him. It crushed his soul to watch her die a slow, painful death.
So Avery Gould had opted to kill her himself.
In the dark of night, once her other visitors had departed, he had come to her bedside and planted a soft kiss on each of her eyelids. He had held her hand and sung a soft lullaby. The pillow sat in his lap, waiting to smother the last spark of life from the frail shell of her former self that she had become. He couldn't see her like this. But the thought of following through brought him to tears. He slumped forward, sobbing against her fragile body.
"What are you doing?" The voice came from across the room. A man, silhouetted in the light of the hallway. "What the hell are you doing?" The other man closed the distance between them and yanked Avery to his feet, away from her, and he tugged the sheets with him. She awoke with a yelp, tumbling from the bed.
"M-Michael? What's going on?" she rasped.
"I don't know, baby. This freak was crying over you." He gestured to Avery, who scrabbled desperately to get back to her side, only to find a big wall of a man in his way. "Do you know him?"
"He's... one of my nurses, I think."
"Did he touch you?"
Avery hadn't, he had refused to, beyond her hand. True, she was an angel, perfection in human form, too good for this world. But he had resisted. Why should he befoul such beauty? He grasped at the woman, hand reaching between the other man's legs, until someone took him from behind and carried him out into the hall. He screamed and kicked and thrashed, and as he was thrown into a chair across from her room, he heard beeping. Frantic beeping. Nurses and doctors alike rushed to her side, but he wasn't welcome.
He didn't see her again.
He looked down at the picture once more. Another figure, right beside her. Fit, well-dressed, his arms around her midsection. Avery had burned the bastard's face off with a cigarette, careful not to light to whole picture on fire. He clung to the photo as tears began to well up. He couldn't even return to his bed, he just fell back against the bathroom wall and sunk to the floor. Here he was, unemployed and loveless, and as his stomach churned yet again, all he could see was her face, the fear in her eyes as he tried to hold her close one last time. She was all he would see, the rest of his life.
